Song of the Bicycle and the Fence
That night, all the whys and fuck yous
on the cyclist’s mind pumped a life force
into the bike under the crotch. At midnight
the bicycle propels itself, its lonely chain
clicking along with cloud-shaped dolphins
in the starry sky. A lesson on labor movements
surges through the bike frame. The Forever,
heavier than the 28, like a black steel swan
drifting down a blind path. Suddenly
it’s fed up, its handlebars crave rust:
it sees the fence. That’s its metal Leda.
The bike rears up and pounces on the fence’s wet openings.
It’s stuck there forever, spurting 1980s heat.
Greenland
Magssanguaq Qujaukitsoq
was the first Greenlander I met.
To meet him was to meet one
fifty-thousandth of Greenland’s population.
He sat beside us with a group
of Viking descendants, but he looked more like
a spy we’d sent to the Arctic Circle
wearing a welcome to shanghai T-shirt
he bought at Beijing airport. His Inuit smile
was Asian ten thousand years ago.
His father was a hunter in northernmost Greenland.
His mother’s family raised sheep at the southern tip.
I asked him what his father hunted
and he told me: seals. Then, with words and gestures
he showed me how to cook seal and I imagined
all the chicken and duck on the table
was braised seal with bamboo shoots, seal soup
with radish pickle. How reliable did the gods have to be
to make his parents meet on an island
the size of a continent? And then
how many polar bears’ worth of strength
did it take to raise Magssanguaq Qujaukitsoq
into a man who drinks, writes poems, and plays soccer
with a temperament as open as an ice floe?
He used to teach kids to use Greenlandic
to hunt fierce aurorae on their vocal chords.
Now he’s a district judge with a caseload so small
he has time to travel and feel homesick.
He gave me a pile of postcards from Greenland:
sunlight like a strong stubby thumb
pressing down on the colored tacks of houses
in ice plains by the sea.
He looked forward to Greenland’s independence
from Denmark. Not because his brother, a politician,
might be the first president, but because
he prefers sled dogs who don’t pull sleds.
When I heard that, I felt a majestic sled dog
spring out from my ribs, freed from
dragging around my life in an empire,
and rush toward the ice sheet.
Image © Europeana
